


An Untitled Life

by Winterstar



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Psychological Torture, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 11:23:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5583985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterstar/pseuds/Winterstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve remembers the ice or does he? What’s real, what isn’t? He doesn’t know who to trust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Untitled Life

“The dreams are back?”

He bows his head, keeping his sight lowered to the floor. He paints pictures in his head as he stares at the intricate paisley patterns on the carpet.

“Steve, the dreams, they’re back?”

“Yes, yes ma’am, they are,” Steve says and hates to admit it. This place, these walls, this god damned carpet with its endless swirls of purples, pinks, and greens will be his prison forever. Ever since the ice. He hisses. “There was no ice.”

His therapist taps the pad and he looks up. He’s been conditioned to focus on her when she taps the pad. He knows this, deep inside, but doesn’t remember how or why. She’s sitting across from him. Her blonde hair is tight in a bun, but one tendril curls around her heart shaped face. Her blue eyes pierce more than invite and there’s something familiar near the edge of her features. He keeps trying to reshape her face but it doesn’t work.

She taps again with a loud sigh. He snaps his attention to her.

“That’s better. Steve, now, we talked about the ice. Tell me about it.” She waits, her dark rimmed glasses make her face older than it should be. He thinks she’s hiding something behind them. “The ice, Steve.”

“The ice,” he says and swallows. “It was cold??”

“No, Steve, come on we worked on this. If you’re ever going to get out of here-.” He doesn’t want her to finish so he rushes in to answer her.

“The ice is fake, it’s not real. It’s a delusion of my mind,” he says and still wonders why it feels so real as if he can reach out and touch the memories of being trapped, suffocating, shivering.

Two taps and he’s back again. “You’re doing it again. You know that? You’re torturing yourself.”

“I know, I know,” he says and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Why does it feel so real? Why does everything in my memory feel real and nothing around here does?”

She smiles and it doesn’t touch her eyes. Her eyes are flat now, dulled by how boring and frustrating he must be as a patient. “Because Steve you still blame yourself. We talked about this. What did we say?”

“I’m responsible for the deaths of over a hundred civilians, women and children mostly. I killed them all. I set them-.” He stops because it roils his stomach and he quakes. “Please don’t make me say it again. Please.”

“Say what, that you set them on fire and watched as they screamed and begged for mercy? Say that you did exactly as ordered by your Commanding Officer, that you don’t have anything to be sorry for, and that the only reason you’re in this hospital is because you tried to kill yourself?” She smiles at him and it turns his stomach. 

He fights not to vomit. “Please.”

“You still don’t believe what you’re capable of, Steve,” she says. “You still imagine yourself as some kind of hero called Captain America, of all things. You’re a soldier, yes, but not a superhero. You were not in World War Two. Tell me when you were born?”

“Nineteen eighteen.”

“Try again.” She taps the pencil and he quakes.

“Nineteen eighty-eight,” he murmurs and the tears sting his eyes. It isn’t true, but it has to be. How can he look like he’s in his late twenties and not like an old man? How could he have lived through the ice? The other patients believe him. “But the serum.”

“Is not real, Steve,” she says and lets out a breath of air. “That’s all for today. I am going to recommend that you submit to more treatments.”

“Please no,” Steve says. It is what she wants to hear.

“And isolation,” she adds. “Your interaction with the others is muddling your mind.”

“Please not isolation, I’ll submit to the treatments without struggling, if you just- if you just tell me I don’t have to be in isolation,” he says and he feels frail; he cannot be in isolation – he can’t. He wants to be with the other patients, be able to eat. He needs food. She hasn’t requisitioned food for him in days. “Please.”

She regards him, studies him like he’s a rat in a cage. “Okay, but this means that your food rations will need to be cut in half. It’s the only way to keep your mind from wandering. It’s safer this way. Right, Steve?”

He nods and bows his head. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay, now, go. I’ll schedule the treatments to begin tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” he says and stands up his body not graceful but jerking as if it is an unbridled horse refusing to be broken. He marches to the door of her office.

“Oh, and Steve?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I think I will double the intensity of the treatments, yes?”

He swallows down the acidic bile. “Yes, ma’am, thank you.” 

Escaping into the hallway, he spots the orderlies as they line the walls. They have assault rifles strapped to their backs and are in military garb. This is no ordinary hospital. He follows the hallway down to the recreational room, but ignores it to find his way to the one small outlet, the one small haven, the library.

When he opens the doors, the two occupants in the room both stand. They are in bathrobes, t-shirts, and pajama pants like he is. They are patients, too.

He nods to them and says, “She agreed. The treatments begin tomorrow.”

“This is too dangerous, I don’t like it, Stevie,” Bucky says and his hair hangs in his face. The tips of his metal hand peeking out of his bathrobe sleeve. 

“We don’t have much choice. We either stay here, and let them experiment on us or we get out,” Steve says and glances at them both.

Bucky doesn’t like it. 

“What if they’re telling the truth?”

Steve faces the other member of their trio, Tony Stark. He has a light in his chest and he’s got lines of black marking his neck. He’s dying and he’s the lynchpin to their plan. “You really believe that? You believe what they said about that thing in your chest? That you’re nuts and implanted it to kill yourself because of the guilt?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I am dying,” Tony says. He looks paler today, gaunt.

“You’re not going to die if we can get out of here,” Steve says and then the memories, those horrible memories of the women calling, begging him to stop, the fire consuming them. He forces the images away. “I refuse to believe it. It never happened.”

“And what?” Tony says. “I’m a superhero, you’re Captain America from the comics, and he’s some weird ass assassin?”

“Tony, you said you could get a transmitter so that we could alert the Avengers, can you or not?” Steve asks.

“I can,” Tony says and taps on the disk in his chest. “Only thing is, this doesn’t feel right. You know, I got this taken out. I blew up the suits, I got rid of it. Why is it back and killing me if anything I remember is true?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says and glances at Bucky. He knows that Bucky isn’t supposed to be here. Bucky is the Winter Soldier, he never found Bucky after the fall of SHIELD. “All I know is that we have to get out of here-.”

The door swings open behind them and Steve jumps to his feet. Five of the orderlies surround them, rifles drawn. “You’re to come with us. Doctor has ordered complete isolation and two rounds of treatment daily, starting today.”

“No, no,” Steve says and looks at Tony and Bucky. “The doctor said I didn’t need to be isolated, that the treatments didn’t start until tomorrow.” They need one more day for the plan to work.

The carpet hides the click of her heels as she appears behind the soldiers. “Steve, you lie all the time. You’ll go with the orderlies. I think we should consider total isolation for the next month. Two treatments daily.”

Bucky leaps to his feet but one of the soldiers pulls out a baton and hits him until he crumples to the floor. Steve flies into action, but the lack of food, the constant treatments have stolen his strength. The guards have him beaten to submission in minutes. A gurney is rolled into the room. The guards load him onto it.

“Start the treatments,” the doctor says and then turns to his friends. “Either one of you want to join him?”

Bucky huffs into the carpet, his nose and mouth bleeding. Tony only shakes his head slowly.

“Take him.”

Much later, he sits in the cell, alone. He remembers nothing but the paisley print of the carpet outside of his cell. The swirls and colors penetrate his mind. When they come for him every day, he stares at the print and watches at the drool from his mouth drops onto it. He watches every day and every night. He lays wrecked in the room with no light, no bed, no heat, no water. He remembers the ice. He remembers the fire. He cannot remember which one is real.

The fire materializes into a beautiful woman who comes to him in a dream. There’s a green monster hovering over her. The monster picks him up, carries him away, away from the room, away from the paisley print, away from the treatments. Someone tells him, he’s going to be okay. Someone promises him these things. 

“Come on, Cap, you remember me?” A man with the bow and arrow asks.

He only smiles. If he answers they might give him another treatment.

“Give him time.” 

A hand caresses his face. It’s metal and now he knows he’s dreaming. He never found Bucky. “Stevie, you’re with us now. We got out.”

Steve only grasps onto Bucky’s hand. None of this is real. He needs the doctor. The ghosts have come back. He tugs Bucky down to him and whispers, “Take me back. Take me back, please.”

“Back?” Tony says and the scream of engines, of jet engines, fills the air. “We just got you out, Cap. Lay back, take a load off.”

Steve struggles, but it is weak and hopeless. “Please, take me back. The doctor. She’ll be angry if I leave. Please.”

“Son of a bitch,” Tony mutters.

“It’ll be okay, just give him time,” the woman made of fire says.

As the jet lifts off the ground, his body shudders and he murmurs over and again. “Take me back, take me back.”

**Author's Note:**

> Interested in where I might go with this? Follow me on [tumblr](http://winterstar95.tumblr.com) to find out more or to tell me what you want to see. I am toying with the idea of going back in time and setting it all up and explaining what happened. But I just might leave it as is. Always depends....
> 
>  
> 
> Comments and kudos feed the starving artist


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